All posts tagged Rabbit

When I spotted this 1980s Volkswagen Rabbit convertible recently, I was impressed by its clean condition and the way it so completely captured its period. But what really caught my eye was its black vinyl car bra. I hadn’t seen one for many years but during the 1980s it seemed like at least half the cars on the road were wearing them.

Before brassieres emerged widely as fashion accessories to be flaunted, cars were already sporting them as outerwear. Auto makers used them as protective garments to keep stones from chipping the paint on the front ends of cars during road tests. I recall a Porsche magazine ad from around 1970 — give or take a few years – that showed a 911 on a test track with a loose-fitting front-end cover of olive-drab canvas. It looked like military surplus and clearly wasn’t meant to be worn in public.

The question came up following a colleague’s fender bender in a Honda Insight hybrid. What seemed like a minor bump left the car undrivable and crumpled to the tune of several thousand dollars of repair work. So are hybrid cars more susceptible to damage than conventional models?

When summing up an accident such as this one first has to talk through the denial (I’m sure I didn’t hit him that hard) and the fact that anyone who walks away unhurt from a car crash is lucky. We’re talking about potentially deadly force when two big objects weighing thousands of pounds come together, and people die in low-speed collisions all the time.